水凝胶目前广泛用于各种生物医学应用,并显示出制造生物传感器等设备的巨大潜力,药物输送载体,承运人,或组织工程中细胞培养的基质,等。在这些应用中,由于人体或其器官/结构的不规则复杂表面,这些设备通常设计有一个小的厚度,并且当附着到生物表面时需要是柔性的。这些设备将在人体运动的驱动下以及在外部负载下变形。在机械建模方面,这些设备中的大多数可以抽象为shell。在本文中,我们提出了一种混合图-有限元方法(FEM)相场方法来模拟由水凝胶组成的弯曲壳的断裂,生物医学应用。我们在这里提供了可穿戴生物传感器断裂的例子,膜涂层药物,和细胞培养基质,每个都由水凝胶制成。与实验材料测试结合使用,我们的方法开辟了一个新的途径,在生物医学设备的断裂的有效建模与任意曲率的表面,有助于设计具有可调断裂特性的器件。
Hydrogels are nowadays widely used in various biomedical applications, and show great potential for the making of devices such as biosensors, drug- delivery vectors, carriers, or matrices for cell cultures in tissue engineering, etc. In these applications, due to the irregular complex surface of the human body or its organs/structures, the devices are often designed with a small thickness, and are required to be flexible when attached to biological surfaces. The devices will deform as driven by human motion and under external loading. In terms of mechanical modeling, most of these devices can be abstracted as shells. In this paper, we propose a mixed graph-finite element method (FEM) phase field approach to model the fracture of curved shells composed of hydrogels, for biomedical applications. We present herein examples for the fracture of a wearable biosensor, a membrane-coated drug, and a matrix for a cell culture, each made of a hydrogel. Used in combination with experimental material testing, our method opens a new pathway to the efficient modeling of fracture in biomedical devices with surfaces of arbitrary curvature, helping in the design of devices with tunable fracture properties.